Something Wicked Read online

  SOMETHING WICKED

  Tom Williams

  The right of Tom Williams to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This story is a work of fiction. Names and characters are the products of the author’s imagination and any resemblance to actual persons, living, dead or undead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2021 Tom Williams

  All rights reserved.

  By the pricking of my thumbs,

  Something wicked this way comes.

  - Macbeth

  -1-

  The call was logged at 16:43 on Monday 27 January. The body of Lord Christopher Penrith had been discovered at his Chelsea home.

  Later, listening to the tape, several people commented that the caller seemed unnaturally calm. It made some suspicious, but the explanation was simply that Mr Charles Simmons had been a gentleman’s gentleman for decades and a true gentleman’s gentleman is never agitated. The air of calm did not conceal any terrible secret. The butler didn’t do it.

  * * *

  First on the scene was PC Shelby. Frank Shelby had been a police constable for almost as long as Charles Simmons had been a butler. Some of the younger police thought this showed old Frank must be bad at his job, but the older hands knew better. Shelby was still a constable because he liked to walk the beat (though nowadays he drove, police manpower cuts making foot patrols an expensive luxury). A string of inspectors had all tried to persuade him to take his sergeant’s exam – a test they were sure he could pass with ease – but Frank had refused. Eventually the inspectors had given up, valuing Frank for the experience which meant he dealt calmly with everything that the job threw at him.

  It took him only a few minutes to drive to the mansion block where Lord Penrith had lived. Although it was rush hour, there was little traffic in the back streets south of Sloane Square. The rich, Shelby knew, like to live away from the noise of traffic. They don’t particularly appreciate police sirens either. He drove with blue lights flashing but sirens silent, pulling up on the double yellow lines outside Penrith’s door.

  The butler was waiting for him at the top of the short flight of steps that led to the entrance of the red brick building. Charles Simmons did not need to introduce himself. In his dark suit and carefully knotted tie, he was as distinctively uniformed as any police officer.

  “If you would care to accompany me, sir.”

  The butler seemed as calm as if Shelby was visiting for a late afternoon tea. Or perhaps rather early for pre-dinner drinks.

  Shelby followed the butler to an old-fashioned lift with a lattice-work metal grille and gates you slid back by hand. The butler pressed the button for the third floor and they slowly began to ascend.

  Shelby wondered what he would find. He had, over the years, been called to hundreds of deaths. Generally a uniformed constable would be the first to attend and nobody else would be called out until he had made his report. Many deaths turned out not to involve a body at all. Someone had been injured or just collapsed. Often by the time he arrived they were already sitting up and insisting that there was nothing to worry about. He would call an ambulance and he and the paramedics would persuade the erstwhile corpse to go to hospital for a check-up. Sometimes there was no body at all, alive or dead. Besides the hoaxes (a depressingly regular occurrence) there were locked bedrooms which were, indeed, locked, but the occupant was on the outside and had simply gone for an unannounced walk. Or the door wasn’t locked at all but jammed and he had forced it open to be greeted by an elderly lady who had been soundly sleeping but who, at the crash of a splintering doorframe, had woken screaming. On one occasion the shock had been so severe that a doctor had been called and, for a few anxious moments, Shelby had thought he might find himself calling in a death after all.

  In this case, though, there was a body and it was indisputably dead.

  Lord Penrith was sitting in a leather armchair – or, rather his body was. It was easy to think of him as being still there, because the body looked so peaceful. It was, though, completely cold with a dreadful pallor. Shelby placed his fingers on the neck, checking for a pulse, but he already knew he wouldn’t find one. There was no need to call an ambulance.

  The butler stood beside the chair, as if waiting for his employer to stir and demand a brandy, or whatever it was that Penrith had drunk when he was alive.

  “If you could leave the room, please sir.” Shelby spoke with quiet authority. A quick glance around – bookcases, a desk, a leather sofa and a couple of upholstered upright chairs – showed no obvious signs of disturbance and Shelby wanted to keep it that way.

  He followed the butler out. “Is there anybody else in the flat?”

  No, there wasn’t.

  “Do you have your own room here?”

  Shelby was pretty sure he had. The likes of Penrith would want live-in staff.

  “Yes, sir. It’s…”

  Shelby didn’t wait to hear where it was. “If you could wait there, someone will come and find you.”

  The butler hesitated for a moment. “Should I lock the door?”

  Shelby shook his head. In all his years on the force, Shelby had never seen a corpse that looked quite like this one: the pallor and the strangely peaceful attitude of the body. It had not slumped or spasmed. It was as if the blood had drained from it, leaving the body undisturbed. This was definitely a death that would be investigated and the door might carry some sign of the last person to use it before Lord Penrith died. It was best touched as little as possible.

  The butler still hesitated, apparently unwilling to leave his master, but a look at Shelby’s face persuaded him that his continued presence was not appreciated. He turned and headed away to the further recesses of the flat.

  As soon as the butler was out of sight, Shelby radioed in and settled to wait. Nobody gave him any instructions. He knew the routine by now.

  The first to arrive was the duty officer, who was in and out in no time, his presence being little more than a formality.

  Next to turn up was Detective Chief Inspector Galbraith. He must have been at the station almost as long as Shelby. He was in his late forties, beginning to run to fat, but still a solid man whose presence inspired confidence. He grunted a greeting to Shelby and gestured toward the door behind him. “In here?”

  Shelby nodded as Sergeant Green followed his boss, carrying a sports bag that Shelby knew would contain the coveralls and overshoes that everybody entering the room with the body would be wearing.

  David Green was new to the station but seemed a nice enough lad. (Shelby had been around long enough to feel entitled to think of anyone much under forty as a lad.) He unzipped the bag and tossed over a roll of crime scene tape.

  “Put this across the entrance to the flat and then go down to the street door. Nobody into the building who doesn’t live here.”

  Shelby caught it and nodded. From inside the murder room he heard Galbraith call out. “There'll be someone along to relieve you on the door as soon as they’ve sorted themselves out at the station. Then get back up here. I’ll have plenty for you to do.”

  Shelby hadn’t made it as far as the front door before the police surgeon was on his way up. Shelby nodded a greeting and the surgeon panted a reply. He was seriously overweight – never a good look for a doctor – and Shelby knew he had taken to avoiding lifts in the hope that climbing the stairs would help lose a few pounds, but the betting in the station was that he was more likely to die of a heart attack than ever reach his target weight.

  Shelby looked up towards the landing to see the doctor pause at the door to regain his breath before ducking under the tape. Sooner him than me, thought Shelby. T
here had been something very wrong about that corpse – something more than simply the absence of life. Shelby shook his head, as if trying to shake off an unpleasant thought, and carried on down the stairs.

  * * *

  Galbraith had heard the doctor coming (the wheezing was clearly audible for some distance) and went to greet him, waiting while he put on his coveralls before leading the way into the murder room.

  Galbraith only glanced at the corpse. He would worry about the deceased after the doctor had finished. For now he admired the room. The curtains were still drawn back, but it was dark outside and the room was gloomy except for the light from an old-fashioned standard lamp near the armchair where the police surgeon was fussing over the body. The evening light suited the place with its maroon floor length curtains, its dark striped wallpaper, brown leather armchairs and sofa, and a richly patterned rug where the predominant shade was red. A Chinese vase, in a sombre blue, was left, as if casually, on a side table. The only discordant shade came from the bookcases where, vivid between the leather bound volumes, some paperbacks stood out in yellows and greens. Galbraith was instinctively suspicious of such a room, of so much money spent to give the careful impression that nobody had gone to any effort over the furnishing at all. Perhaps, he thought, no money had been spent on it. Wasn’t there some saying about how a gentleman never bought his furniture – he just inherited it?

  Looking around the room and knowing the neighbourhood he realised he had simply assumed this was old money. Assumptions, though, were not a great idea in detective work. He turned to the doctor.

  “Thoughts?”

  “Well he’s definitely dead.”

  Galbraith did not smile. At some point, he hoped, somebody would be standing trial for murder. That would be an uncomfortable time to realise that you didn’t have a doctor confirm death at the scene.

  “Any idea how?”

  The doctor gave a tired smile. Everybody always asked. “I’m a doctor, Chief Inspector. I prefer my patients alive. You want a pathologist.”

  Galbraith smiled back. It was a ritual that they went through every time.

  “Go mad and take a guess.”

  “Well …” The doctor held up a wrist. “The pallor suggests a lot of blood loss and there are incision injuries on the wrist. I imagine these wounds would have bled a lot, but they’ve been cleaned up. There's no sign of any exsanguination at all.” He reached down to the trousers and pulled up the bottom of the leg. “There’s no pooling of blood in the calves either.” He rearranged the trouser leg. “If he was killed here, you would expect that. Of course, he could have been killed somewhere else and bled out there, but I’d expect to see some mess – unless the body was washed and dressed after the event. There’s no sign of rigor and the body is quite dry, so they’d have had to have been quick. It’s not impossible, though. The pathologist will be able to give you a better idea.” He straightened up. “It’s quite warm in here. I’ll make a note of the temperature in case the time of death becomes an issue.”

  He took a thermometer from his bag and glanced at it.

  “Aren’t you going to take the temperature of the corpse?”

  The doctor gave a little moue of disgust. “I’m not pulling his trousers down and sticking a thermometer up his bum. Have some respect. That’s what pathologists are for. Terrible people.”

  He replaced the thermometer, made a couple of notes in a black book that also vanished back into his bag. “There are a couple of comedians I need to take blood samples from back at the station, so I’ll be on my way. It’s ridiculously early for that sort of nonsense and on a Monday night too, but there’s no accounting for taste.”

  Galbraith watched as the doctor left and then bent to look at the corpse himself. He wasn’t ever sure quite why he bothered. He was even less equipped to second-guess the pathologist's findings than was the doctor. It was, he supposed, a way to connect with the victim as a human being – somebody that he might care about. There were detectives who viewed the whole business as some sort of abstract puzzle, but to Galbraith it was, in the end, always personal.

  “Better get hold of the butler and find out more about this chap,” he said to his sergeant. “Check he’s already been in here and if he has he can come in again and tell me all about it.”

  Sgt Green vanished to find the butler’s room and Galbraith turned back to the corpse. He saw a man of early middle age, hair beginning to grey but still, when alive, good-looking in a patrician way. Even in death his face had a slightly superior look, accentuated perhaps by quite a beaky nose. He was, as far as Galbraith could judge while the body was seated, a little under six feet tall (Galbraith was not a great one for metric measurement) and slim for his age. Galbraith imagined that he used to look after himself – worked out in a local gym perhaps. It was depressing how often he attended on bodies which were in the peak of health, apart from the whole business of being dead.

  “I’ve got Mr Simmons for you, sir.” His sergeant hovered just outside the doorway. “He says he went in and found the body. Hasn’t changed his clothes since.”

  “It can’t do any harm if he comes in again then. Give him some over-shoes to be on the safe side.”

  There was something slightly ridiculous about the sight of the butler in his dark suit, his oxfords covered with the white polythene overshoes, but somehow, as he glided into the room, his dignity remained intact.

  The deceased was, he explained, a hereditary peer, one of only 92 still sitting in the House of Lords. “The title,” said Simmons, with more than a touch of pride, “went back to 1548. Sadly,” and he cast a glance at the body, “the title is now no more. Lord Penrith was an only child and he never married.”

  “But he must have had relatives.” Galbraith liked a note of relatives. If a single man was murdered, relatives provided a convenient list of initial suspects. In this case, though, he was to be disappointed. Penrith had no living relatives.

  “So where does his money go?”

  Simmons was unable to answer for certain but he gave the name of Lord Penrith's solicitors. “I am sure his Lordship had drawn up a will. He was very careful in matters of business.”

  Careful and successful. Several hundred years’ worth of inherited wealth had resulted in a portfolio spread between the stock market and property. Pressed, Simmons said it was likely that most of the money would go to charity. “His Lordship was very generous. It is likely that his old school and his college might benefit and he supported several arts organisations.”

  It was possible, Galbraith imagined, that some theatre director might kill to fund his next production, but it seemed implausible – especially as Simmons’ answers suggested that the legatees were unlikely to know of their good fortune in advance.

  “So he’s got no family. What about friends?”

  For the first time Simmons seemed a little unsure of himself. “He had no particularly close friends.” Galbraith noticed that Penrith had suddenly become “he” rather than “his Lordship”. Simmons was worried.

  “So friends, but nobody close.”

  “Not particular friends, sir. Nobody who comes to mind.”

  “Ah.” There was a wealth of meaning in that ‘Ah’. “So would it be fair to suggest that he had occasional close friends but they were not particular friends. They changed a lot.”

  Simmons, now visibly embarrassed, was slow to reply. Galbraith moved on to his next question while the butler was still struggling to find a suitable answer.

  “And would these friends have been male or female?”

  Simmons paused and then, like a man about to plunge into a cold pool, he took a deep breath. “His Lordship did not especially enjoy the company of women.”

  Galbraith nodded. “But he was discreet.”

  “Always, sir.”

  “And you were out this afternoon.”

  “I had expressed an interest in the British Museum exhibition on Troy, sir. His Lordship was kind enough to suggest I might
take the afternoon to visit it.”

  “And do you think his Lordship might have been expecting a visitor while you were improving your mind at the museum?”

  “I really wouldn’t know, sir.”

  “I’ll take that as a ‘yes’. Have you any idea who it might have been?” Simmons, by now beginning to look somewhat flushed, was struggling to compose an answer. Before he could open his mouth, Galbraith warned: “Remember this is a murder enquiry. Don’t let your discretion put you off telling me the truth.”

  Simmons’ struggle with his loyalty to his master was all-too-visible on his face, but Galbraith was relieved to see him decide to tell the police all he knew – though that turned out to be little enough. Lord Penrith had, indeed, been discreet. Visitors generally arrived after the butler had been given an afternoon off and were safely off the premises before he returned.

  “Very occasionally his Lordship would have a guest overnight, but they always slept in the guest bedroom.”

  “So you would see these guests” (Galbraith was careful to pronounce ‘guests’ in a studiously neutral tone) “at breakfast.”

  Yes, Simmons confirmed, he did. “But there was never any hint of impropriety. His Lordship was a man with many friends. He would often offer his house to people visiting town from the country.”

  Galbraith imagined that he didn’t mean people coming up from a terraced house in Truro to take their kids round the museums. “Did he ever have younger visitors?”

  Again Simmons’ face reflected the struggle within.

  “Once or twice perhaps.”

  “Not the sort of people you would think might be up from the country?”

  “Perhaps not.”

  “So where do you think his Lordship” (this time Galbraith was unable to keep his tone quite as neutral as he might have liked) might have met these young men?”

  It was, Galbraith thought, like drawing teeth. The butler claimed to be almost entirely ignorant of how Lord Penrith spent his day. “He liked to attend the House of Lords when they were debating matters that particularly interested him.”